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Allen School Alumni

Alumni News

The Allen School’s Alumni News features stories and updates that celebrate the achievements and experiences of our alumni.

Allen School faculty recognized 2025 alumni Wei and Zhu for their outstanding doctoral dissertation research identifying new methods for tackling online harassment introducing more secure techniques for generating digital signatures, respectively.

Allen School alum Cory Black (B.S., ‘18) left a career in tech behind when he literally ran off to join the circus. Now a full-time soccer freestylist, he recently took home the bronze medal from the International Jugglers’ Association Championships.

Murphy (Ph.D., ‘96), professor and former Vice-President Research and Innovation at the University of British Columbia, will lead the Vancouver, BC organization’s efforts to engage learners in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art & design and math).

Researchers in the Programming Languages & Software Engineering (PLSE) group introduced egg, an open-source library that uses e-graphs along with equality saturation to optimize term representations. Their paper was recently featured as a Communications of the ACM Research Highlight.

Li (B.S., ‘13) and his collaborators received the award for resolving a foundational problem in robust statistics, proving that a broad class of high-dimensional statistical problems can be both efficiently and robustly solved, even when some of the data has been corrupted.

Professors David Kohlbrenner and Franziska Roesner (Ph.D., ‘14) of the Allen School’s Privacy & Security Research Lab found that browser agents are susceptible to cyberattacks by violating the same-origin policy, a cornerstone of modern web security that has safeguarded users for 30 years.

Dawson and Khoussainova, the 2026 Alumni Impact Award recipients, have combined their computing skillset with their entrepreneurial spirit to build companies that are making a positive impact in people’s lives.

The award, which is based on nominations from University of Washington alumni, honors “UW educators whose profound influence continues to shape the lives of their students long after they’ve left the classroom.”

After more than four decades on the faculty, Henry M. Levy (Hank) officially retired from the University of Washington last summer. Now, friends and colleagues are contributing to the creation of a new professorship in the Allen School to honor his vision and leadership.

Multiple Allen School authors received Best Paper Awards or honorable mentions for their work on interactive systems that enable more flexible human-AI agent collaboration, an AI-based tool that helps screen-reader users make sense of geovisualizations, and more.